Description:

Filmed with a borrowed camera and featuring a cast made up almost entirely of the director’s friends and relatives, Taking Father Home is the moving story of Xu Yun, a teenager who lives in a remote village in China’s Sichuan province. With nothing but a basket of geese to use as currency, he travels to the city of Zigong to find and retrieve his father who walked out on the family six years before. Once in Zigong, Yun learns quickly as he finds no shortage of mentors eager to impart advice.

Director Ying Liang’s remarkable evocation of the sights, sounds and smells of Zigong is breathtaking, recreating the mood and character of an entire culture with just the simplest of touches and the most basic use of dialogue. An utterly engaging emotional experience, Taking Father Home has established Ying as one of world cinema’s most promising young talents.

Trailer:

Reviews:

“I could not tear myself away from the screen until I learned the outcome of Xu Yun’s journey to take father home”- Malcom L. Rigsby, Department of Sociology, Ouachita Baptist University

“Ying presents China with an incisive, analytical eye; in his calmly unfolding tableaux, the dramatic action seems to arise from the jarring locations, such as high-rise buildings abutting rundown alleys and desolate boulevards that loom in the night like dead zones. The eruption of the foretold devastation—the floods, which are shown in documentary images—corresponds to the moral devastation that surrounds the boy’s desperate mission. This richly nuanced yet powerfully symbolic movie is an astonishingly accomplished début.”- Richard Brody, the New Yorker